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Speaker 2: Oh hi, it's the French fry under your seat. You
Speaker 2: won't find for another four months. Ali Ward and here
Speaker 2: we are. The trashiest episode of Ologies ever made. This
Speaker 2: is another one of those years in the making interviews.
Speaker 2: You're going to talk about it forever. So I came
Speaker 2: across this person's name in relation to garbage, and I thought,
Speaker 2: I must meet this garbage person. They seem great. They
Speaker 2: are a clinical professor in New York University's Liberal Studies Department.
Speaker 2: They teach on the topic of garbage. They have worked
Speaker 2: intimately with garbage. They did a ted talk about garbage.
Speaker 2: They have three anthropology degrees from Columbia University and an
Speaker 2: undergrad and anthropology from New York University, and even authored
Speaker 2: the book Picking Up on the streets and behind the trucks.
Speaker 2: With the sanitation workers of New York City the perfect fit.
Speaker 2: Rubbish research is their life's work. So on a crisp
Speaker 2: fall day in Manhattan, I navigated the cobblestones to a
Speaker 2: conference room on the NYU City campus. And as a
Speaker 2: side note, this episode was recorded in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 2: but I'm sharing it with you again for Earth Day
Speaker 2: month because it's a favorite among the entire Ology staff,
Speaker 2: and listeners say that it has impacted them for years.
Speaker 2: They think about it all the time. I love it
Speaker 2: so yes. It was an autumn afternoon at twenty twenty two,
Speaker 2: and I routinely test for COVID for shoots and stuff.
Speaker 2: I had tested negative the day before, but I had
Speaker 2: been in an indoor gallery event that week, so I
Speaker 2: wanted to keep my mask on for our interview just
Speaker 2: in case. Because COVID is awful, but masks are easy.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 2: One other easy thing to do, if you don't mind,
Speaker 2: is maybe tell a friend about this podcast Ologies, or
Speaker 2: you can support by becoming a patron for a dollar
Speaker 2: a month at patreon dot com. Slash Ologies. Also, rating, subscribing,
Speaker 2: and leaving reviews helps the show so much. And I
Speaker 2: read every single one, such as this very recent one
Speaker 2: left by SJC mud Hut, who said Ali is my
Speaker 2: new best friend, and I really can't help believing she
Speaker 2: makes this podcast for me and me alone, SJC mud Hut,
Speaker 2: It is all for you. Don't tell everyone else.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: On the episode, your brain is about to become a
Speaker 2: dumpster of facts about what people throw away, where garbage goes,
Speaker 2: who takes it there, Finding treasure in landfills, when an
Speaker 2: item becomes garbage, what plastic you can actually recycle, burning trash,
Speaker 2: building on trash, cherishing trash, and more with professor, scholar, author, garbologist,
Speaker 2: discard anthropologist. One of the two, doctor Robin Nakel.
Speaker 3: My name is Robin Nagel, and my pronouns are any all.
Speaker 2: Her most commonly used are she her, So we'll go
Speaker 2: with that the title of this episode. That's more ambiguous.
Speaker 2: But garbageology not your favorite word, which I'm like, let's
Speaker 2: hear it, because it is one of those words that
Speaker 2: it it sounds like a company that makes garbage cans.
Speaker 3: Okay, I'll accept that. But as a description of what
Speaker 3: we could call a field of concern of study of
Speaker 3: crisis of environmental profound environmental relevance. It's too narrow because
Speaker 3: garbage is only one way of thinking about waste.
Speaker 2: But is there a particular way that you describe your
Speaker 2: niche in anthropology.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's kind of under the umbrella of what
Speaker 3: we called applied anthropology. My goal in working with New
Speaker 3: York City Department of Sanitation is twofold. One is to
Speaker 3: help the public understand what it is to be a
Speaker 3: sanitation worker in the city, for the city, and why
Speaker 3: should you care to know that? And the other is
Speaker 3: to help the workforce recognize ways in which they are
Speaker 3: valuable on this meta level that sometimes they don't even
Speaker 3: necessarily acknowledge. I have said many times the Sanitation department
Speaker 3: is the most important workforce in the City of New York,
Speaker 3: and I get push back even from people on the job.
Speaker 3: And I like it when I get pushed back from them,
Speaker 3: in particular because then I launch into my whole rap
Speaker 3: about public health and the diseases that would make COVID
Speaker 3: look like a sneeze if garbage were not managed more
Speaker 3: or less very well. And I'm not saying it's perfect.
Speaker 3: We certainly had huge problems during the pandemic because of
Speaker 3: budget cutbacks and how the operational side of the job
Speaker 3: was thrown into not chaos, but how do you prevent
Speaker 3: it from being thrown into chaos?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: So those realities are always out there. But if sanitation
Speaker 3: isn't on the street every day, this is not the
Speaker 3: New York is not the glittering global capital we imagine.
Speaker 2: It to be. And you know, I was thinking about
Speaker 2: it on the way over here too, the difference between
Speaker 2: focusing on the garbage, which is dirty, which is something
Speaker 2: we all fear, versus the sanitation, which is the solution.
Speaker 2: So do you find that the way that we talk
Speaker 2: about garbage versus sanitation really depends on if we're focusing
Speaker 2: on like the good or the.
Speaker 3: Bad't I never thought of it that way. I like
Speaker 3: that distinction, and I think you've pinpointed a key element here,
Speaker 3: which is garbage equates with fear for fascinating reasons. But sanitation.
Speaker 3: One of the challenges with the word is that we
Speaker 3: could use sanitation to only be talking about things like sewage. Right,
Speaker 3: So when we say sanitation, do we mean garbage, do
Speaker 3: we mean other forms of waste? Do we mean the
Speaker 3: kinds of protocols that are in place? In medical facilities
Speaker 3: and healthcare. All of that has a sanitation connotation or context.
Speaker 3: So same with the word garbage, though, like what exactly
Speaker 3: do we mean by that word? Because it's a multifaceted
Speaker 3: category of material, and depending on how it's defined, that
Speaker 3: dictates I'll say, what happens next and where it goes,
Speaker 3: and what workforce is responsible for it? And what harms
Speaker 3: does it cause or do we prevent it from causing?
Speaker 2: All by the definition, so, to say something is discarded
Speaker 2: implies that it's useless to the person discarding it, but
Speaker 2: not inherently valueless. But garbage can mean food, waste or
Speaker 2: useless stuff. But does even waste have an inherent value
Speaker 2: we shall discuss.
Speaker 3: It also allows for thinking about forms of land, categories
Speaker 3: of people, ways of using time. Do we waste time?
Speaker 3: Do we save time? Are we discarding? Like it's just
Speaker 3: far more It's a far broader and thus perhaps more
Speaker 3: exciting way to think about both the problem, the analysis,
Speaker 3: and then some of the potential solutions.
Speaker 2: How long have you been in this field and why,
Speaker 2: of all the fields of anthropology, did you be lyned
Speaker 2: for this one or did you pingpong around a bit?
Speaker 3: Well, my earlier work in anthropology was about religion, but
Speaker 3: I've always been intrigued by the problem of garbage in
Speaker 3: particular and waste in general, and when I had the
Speaker 3: chance to teach about it, I came up with a
Speaker 3: syllabus that became a class called Garbage in Gotham, the
Speaker 3: Anthropology of Trash That's amazing, And one of the speakers
Speaker 3: was a sanitation worker I had met just on the street,
Speaker 3: who took great care when recycling rolled out in New
Speaker 3: York City to customize the chrome on his truck and
Speaker 3: make it look like such a clean vehicle that you
Speaker 3: could not imagine putting garbage in the back. Because people
Speaker 3: were still throwing garbage in the back of his truck
Speaker 3: when it was supposed to be just recyclables, and it
Speaker 3: really pissed him off. So he decided to address this
Speaker 3: himself and it got him a lot of really good media.
Speaker 3: So he was a guest speaker in my class, which
Speaker 3: was wonderful. But the more I learned about the job,
Speaker 3: the more I realized, especially as an anthropologist, you can't
Speaker 3: just hear stories and then draw conclusion about what is
Speaker 3: essentially a subculture, right it is its own world, So
Speaker 3: then I realized I had to do field work in
Speaker 3: person participant observation, the classic anthropology methodology. And then I realized,
Speaker 3: no matter how detailed that work was, I was not
Speaker 3: responsible for or even legally allowed to drive a truck.
Speaker 3: I wasn't on the job. Right if I said I'd
Speaker 3: be at a given garage on a given morning, and
Speaker 3: I woke up that morning, I'm like, yeah, I don't
Speaker 3: feel like it, which I will admit once in a
Speaker 3: while that happens. My bad. But once in a while
Speaker 3: it happened. Well, no consequence to me except that I
Speaker 3: now have a reputation as being flaky. But there's no
Speaker 3: no hammer falls. But if I'm on the job, I
Speaker 3: have a legal obligation to be in that garage for
Speaker 3: roll call. The city has a legal obligation to make
Speaker 3: sure I am qualified to drive the truck, to operate
Speaker 3: the broom. Those kinds of far more detailed trainings and relationship.
Speaker 3: That's what I needed to do. So I went through
Speaker 3: the whole process. I took the test, I got hired.
Speaker 3: It took about a year from taking the test to
Speaker 3: actually getting hired because it's a very long, slow, tedious process,
Speaker 3: in part because the City of New York must make
Speaker 3: sure by its own metrics, that you, the individual, are
Speaker 3: qualified and capable to do the job they're hiring you
Speaker 3: to do.
Speaker 2: As we recorded this in Manhattan's Greden Trillage, trucks of
Speaker 2: all kinds, garbage and delivery rumbled outside. So just enjoy
Speaker 2: the New York ambiance.
Speaker 3: It's been a puzzle and a kind of an obsession
Speaker 3: of mine for as long as I can remember.
Speaker 2: Have you, before you got the job to do the research,
Speaker 2: had you ever driven anything bigger than like a U
Speaker 2: haul before?
Speaker 3: So my high school sweetheart, his dad owned a moving company,
Speaker 3: and so he taught me how to drive a double
Speaker 3: clutch mac. Oh my god. Now, but this was only
Speaker 3: the cab. I never had a trailer behind, but it
Speaker 3: was It was a blast. And he also taught me
Speaker 3: how to the beginnings of how to operate a bulldozer,
Speaker 3: which is not the same as an FBL a front
Speaker 3: end loader. Like each of these pieces of equipment require
Speaker 3: specific skill and time and forms of knowledge that we
Speaker 3: don't We don't acknowledge the expertise that is required to
Speaker 3: do those particular kinds of jobs really well, Like you
Speaker 3: can use a bulldozer to gouge them out of a
Speaker 3: landscape when you meant to have a nice smooth surface, right.
Speaker 3: And it's same with driving a Mac truck, which is
Speaker 3: why I'm glad we didn't have a trailer. When he's
Speaker 3: teaching me how to do the double clutch thing. So
Speaker 3: cool that Mac truck. So that was And then most
Speaker 3: of the cabs for sanitation trucks are also Mac, but
Speaker 3: they're all automatic transmission. Now there are no more standard
Speaker 3: transmission trucks, which probably just as well, but not great
Speaker 3: for fuel efficiency. But that's a whole other thing.
Speaker 2: But before you are able to drive a garbage truck,
Speaker 2: do you do donuts in like a church parking lot,
Speaker 2: like when you're sixteen and you gotta figure out how
Speaker 2: to book and drive a car.
Speaker 3: So no short answer, longer answer. When I took the
Speaker 3: test for the permit for my commercial driver's license, I
Speaker 3: already had a regular driver's license because I didn't grow
Speaker 3: up in New York City, So we actually did donuts
Speaker 3: on frozen parking lots in high school in the wee
Speaker 3: hours of the morning with no grown ups around, being
Speaker 3: a little bad, misbehaving children. So when I took the
Speaker 3: CDL and went through the training that sanitation offers, which
Speaker 3: is very thorough and meticulous, and then the road test
Speaker 3: and all of that. I was very nervous. But when
Speaker 3: I arrived for that first day of class, I'm sitting
Speaker 3: next to a young man half my age, and he
Speaker 3: never drove anything before he got a CDL because he
Speaker 3: was born and raised in New York City, where you
Speaker 3: don't really need a car the way a suburban high
Speaker 3: school or a teenager may need a car. In fact,
Speaker 3: I don't know if this is true, but I have
Speaker 3: read that the rates of teenage mortality are lowest in
Speaker 3: New York City around the country because they're not driving cars.
Speaker 2: Yeah right. I checked into this, and the state with
Speaker 2: the highest teen death rate not New York. The top
Speaker 2: three were Louisiana, Alaska, and Arkansas. So be careful on
Speaker 2: those roads, kiddo. You gotta slow down, pay attention, you
Speaker 2: know what. Just so a tip for me, designated driver.
Speaker 2: My sister was the victim of a drunk driving accident
Speaker 2: when she was sixteen, and she was airlifted to a hospital.
Speaker 2: The windshield was shattered by her face, and luckily for us,
Speaker 2: she made it out and she is fine, but she
Speaker 2: was picking glass out of her forehead. Years later, the
Speaker 2: guy driving broke a bunch of his legs. So designate
Speaker 2: a driver or volunteer to be for one of your
Speaker 2: friends who will love you all the more knowing that
Speaker 2: they have a safe ride home during which they will
Speaker 2: not get killed or arrested, just saying and buckle up,
Speaker 2: thank you.
Speaker 3: So I knew how to do donuts in a parking lot, right,
Speaker 3: but that doesn't mean you know how to do it
Speaker 3: with a garbage truck. With a collection truck. That's its
Speaker 3: own that I will say you do on the road
Speaker 3: in a collection truck because nobody wants to be near you.
Speaker 3: They don't know if you're empty or full. They just
Speaker 3: don't want to be anywhere near you. So you kind
Speaker 3: of were the king. Yeah, we're a majestyesty, which was fun.
Speaker 2: Robin's twenty thirteen Ted talk is titled What I Discovered
Speaker 2: in New York City Trash, and she explains that a
Speaker 2: childhood camping trip left a really deep impression. And by
Speaker 2: that I think I mean it scarred her, but thankfully
Speaker 2: so for us.
Speaker 3: We got to our campsite, it was a lean to
Speaker 3: on a bluff looking over a crystal, beautiful lake when
Speaker 3: I discovered a horror behind the lean to was a
Speaker 3: dump maybe forty feet square, with rotting apple cores and
Speaker 3: balled up aluminum foil and a dead sneaker. And I
Speaker 3: was astonished. I was very angry, and I was deeply
Speaker 3: confused the campers who were too lazy to take out
Speaker 3: what they had brought in. Who did they think would
Speaker 3: clean up after them? That question stayed with me, and
Speaker 3: it simplified a little who cleans up after us?
Speaker 2: Now, you mentioned that this was an early obsession for you,
Speaker 2: But talking about the history of garbage, if we could
Speaker 2: go back, when does garbage start in humanity? I mean
Speaker 2: we have probably piles of charred bones and things from
Speaker 2: dating back to the beginning of humans gathering, there have
Speaker 2: been garbage piles.
Speaker 3: Right, depends again on your definition of garbage. So one
Speaker 3: of the fun challenges is to decide when is it
Speaker 3: garbage quotes around the word, and when is it evidence
Speaker 3: archaeological treasure, some kind of tidbit of a story of
Speaker 3: our own past. I did a lot of work before,
Speaker 3: just as part of the bigger project with what's called
Speaker 3: the human relations area of files ATREFS so the human
Speaker 3: relations area of files are a compendium of ethnographic data
Speaker 3: cross referenced around. You name the category kinship, child rearing, economic,
Speaker 3: and you know to say economy. That's a huge subject.
Speaker 3: So underneath that inheritance rules ways of organizing what we
Speaker 3: might call religious belief and ceremony and ritual. And so
Speaker 3: I spent quite a while looking at how cultures have
Speaker 3: dealt with waste, how do they define it and what
Speaker 3: do they do about it? And one of the intriguing
Speaker 3: findings I think is that we've kind of never come
Speaker 3: up with a particularly great way of dealing with it.
Speaker 3: Some small scale cultures, when it just got to be
Speaker 3: too much, they just up and moved to a different location.
Speaker 3: Others have buried it over time to the point where
Speaker 3: they raise their elevation. In fact, some of the older
Speaker 3: cities of the world, this is true in Rome and
Speaker 3: some of the other great cities in Europe and parts
Speaker 3: of Asia, some have specific scavenger species they rely on
Speaker 3: to take care of what we would call waste. Putting
Speaker 3: it in a nearby waterway has been very fashionable for
Speaker 3: millennia and not a problem until, of course, we well,
Speaker 3: until many things came to pass. But when we were
Speaker 3: all smaller scale, it didn't decimate that waterway. We've burned it,
Speaker 3: we've used it for fuel, we've ignored it, we have
Speaker 3: mapped it onto different classes, so that if you are
Speaker 3: closer to a given form of waste, through no fault
Speaker 3: of your own, you are considered sort of there's a
Speaker 3: contagion kind of belief that goes with that, and then
Speaker 3: you or status within that culture is diminished. In other words,
Speaker 3: we kind of only to ever burn berry or dump
Speaker 3: in the water or give to scavengers. Recycling. We call
Speaker 3: it recycling, but before that word, it was just reusing
Speaker 3: something until it fell apart, right, which we used to
Speaker 3: do more commonly. And now it's coming back almost through
Speaker 3: this And I don't mean this in a derogatory way,
Speaker 3: but this almost BOUTIQUI DIY, Like, Look, I unraveled this
Speaker 3: old sweater and now I'm re knitting with that yarn,
Speaker 3: which I think is really really cool. It doesn't scale
Speaker 3: up necessarily, and that's a problem if we want to
Speaker 3: solve the challenge, the problem that is solid waste broadly
Speaker 3: defined sweater unraveling by itself. Let's put it this. It's
Speaker 3: a good first step.
Speaker 2: You're doing great, and was there a really big difference
Speaker 2: in terms of how sanitation was handled pre and post
Speaker 2: plastic era?
Speaker 3: Plastics have changed the whole game. We would like to
Speaker 3: believe that plastics are recyclable, but that's not really true.
Speaker 3: They degrade each time they go through a recycling process,
Speaker 3: so after a few times through, you really only have
Speaker 3: a slurry that you can't build or do anything with,
Speaker 3: and it ends up in an incinerator or landfill anyway.
Speaker 3: Plastics also off gas always, so there's always some kind
Speaker 3: of chemical component that's inside the water of the plastic
Speaker 3: water bottle, inside the food, in the plastic packaging, inside
Speaker 3: the baby's mouth when they're suckling on some plastic, you know.
Speaker 3: So that's another waste product that is invisible to us,
Speaker 3: but that is that we now carry in our bodies,
Speaker 3: especially in our fat cells. There is almost no species
Speaker 3: of being on the planet that does not have some
Speaker 3: of these so called forever chemicals inside of ourselves. All
Speaker 3: like name the animal, name the insect, those chemicals are present.
Speaker 2: These chemicals I looked into it are called per and
Speaker 2: polyfluorinated alkyl substances or pfos, and there are close to
Speaker 2: five thousand different types of pfos, But one thing they
Speaker 2: have in common is that they don't occur in nature,
Speaker 2: and bacteria can't break them down, and neither can fire
Speaker 2: or water. Fun Why don't you want such a hardy,
Speaker 2: toxic compound in your system? Oh? Just things like changes
Speaker 2: in liver enzymes, increased risk of high blood pressure or
Speaker 2: preaclamsia in pregnant people, small decreases in infant birth weights,
Speaker 2: increased risk of kidney or testicular cancer, increased cholesterol levels,
Speaker 2: and decreased vaccine response in children, according to the CDC's
Speaker 2: Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Boy, maybe we
Speaker 2: have a solution here. In August of twenty twenty, a
Speaker 2: study was published called Low Temperature Mineralization of perfluoro carboxylic
Speaker 2: Acids by some environmental chemists at Northwestern University who found
Speaker 2: that a few types of pfas can indeed decompose using
Speaker 2: some inexpensive and easy to obtain reagents sodium hydroxide and
Speaker 2: dimethyl sulfoxide. In case you're taking notes, at about two
Speaker 2: hundred and forty eight degrees fahrenheit, which is a relatively
Speaker 2: low temperature that won't even bake a cookie, but the
Speaker 2: end product is non toxic and benign. This is amazing.
Speaker 2: This just came out a few months ago. Did we
Speaker 2: fix forever chemicals? Not at all, Not at all. This
Speaker 2: only works on certain types of p fas, and environmental
Speaker 2: scientists still say to stop making and dumping them. Like
Speaker 2: we learned in the Oceanology episode, the first task in
Speaker 2: cleaning up the ocean is to stop letting so much
Speaker 2: trash into the ocean in the first place. Otherwise you're
Speaker 2: just chasing your toxic tail. Oh, speaking of plastics.
Speaker 3: Plastics also connect to a kind of industrial process and
Speaker 3: complex of planned obsolescence and trying to convince a larger
Speaker 3: public that each of us, as an individual is responsible
Speaker 3: for making sure that plastic object goes into the right
Speaker 3: bin to be recycled, even though the recyclability of it
Speaker 3: is mostly a myth. But there was a deliberate campaign
Speaker 3: that started in the nineteen fifties to teach us that
Speaker 3: we are the individuals responsible, and by extension, municipalities are responsible.
Speaker 4: The responsibility for sanitary refuse disposal falls upon every citizen, not.
Speaker 3: The manufacturers of those products. That changes everything and The
Speaker 3: other problem with plastics, of course, among many others, is
Speaker 3: their longevity. They don't biodegrade, or if they do, it's very,
Speaker 3: very very slow. And meanwhile they are contributing their chemical
Speaker 3: composition to these large environments and animals.
Speaker 4: I just want to say one word, tail, just one word, Yes,
Speaker 4: sir listening, Yes, are you plastics?
Speaker 3: So? Yeah, plastics. Plastics has changed everything.
Speaker 2: Does it change the way that you live your life
Speaker 2: or what you use? I think we're all so anxious
Speaker 2: about it. We don't know what to do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, now that's a real problem, and especially this complete contradiction.
Speaker 3: I have been taught that I, as an individual, am
Speaker 3: responsible for saving the planet by making sure to recycle
Speaker 3: my plastics and glass and paper and metal. But I
Speaker 3: know partly because I study it, and then other people
Speaker 3: know this sort of in their gut, like, yeah, this
Speaker 3: doesn't I'm not sure. We've had recycling for a while now.
Speaker 3: I don't see the earth getting better, so what's going on?
Speaker 3: So it creates this cognitive dissonance. It erodes trust in
Speaker 3: the systems that are telling us to please recycle. I
Speaker 3: think that learning the practice of recycling being religious about it,
Speaker 3: no pun intended. I think that's important because it can
Speaker 3: create a push from the ground up from those of
Speaker 3: us as individuals together to press for are there plastic
Speaker 3: polymers that could actually be recycled. Are there compostable plastics
Speaker 3: that could work in municipal compost systems? Because if something
Speaker 3: says it's compostable, okay, that's great, compostable in what context
Speaker 3: through what specific mechanisms of heat and time, and those
Speaker 3: are built very carefully to account for whatever is the
Speaker 3: primary material you know you're going to be dealing with,
Speaker 3: like yard waste and food scraps. But if you add
Speaker 3: compostable plastic, that doesn't necessarily come out the other side
Speaker 3: as compost but as still breaking down pieces of plastic
Speaker 3: that need a different system. So if enough of us
Speaker 3: are frustrated enough, but we also practice this, we do recycle.
Speaker 3: That's a great raw material for what could become an
Speaker 3: effective political agitation to make plastic recycling real if that's
Speaker 3: chemically possible.
Speaker 2: So it's time to get mad as hell if you're
Speaker 2: not already about a lot of stuff. And there are
Speaker 2: so many triangles with a number in the middle.
Speaker 3: Those don't mean anything, Well, let me back up. They
Speaker 3: mean they tell you the primary polymer component of that
Speaker 3: kind of plastic, but it does not mean it's recycle ubble.
Speaker 3: And in fact, the only ones that can go through
Speaker 3: the system a few times are numbers one and two,
Speaker 3: the PET and HDPE high density polyethyling And I forget
Speaker 3: what PET stands for polyethylene thallate something.
Speaker 2: PET side note stands for polyethylene tear thalate. And it's
Speaker 2: the most common thermoplastic polymer resin of the polyester family.
Speaker 2: If it does say so itself, it's very common. PET
Speaker 2: isn't so much. It's in your clothes, it's in fiberglass,
Speaker 2: it's in a bunch of manufacturing items. But where you
Speaker 2: know it best is probably food containers while squinting at
Speaker 2: the bottom of them.
Speaker 3: So the Chasing Era's symbol was a college student won
Speaker 3: an award when there was a design competition in the
Speaker 3: seventies to come up with some way of indicating recycling matters.
Speaker 3: But then it got co opted and most people believe, like,
Speaker 3: if the Chasing Era symbol is on the bottom of
Speaker 3: a plastic container while it's recyclable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, nuh huh, Well I've been lied to.
Speaker 3: Yes you have, oh you have. We all have. That's
Speaker 3: what I talk about propaganda, That's what I mean. And
Speaker 3: it is a deliberate strategy of a conglomeration of corporations
Speaker 3: who go under the umbrella of Keep America Beautiful.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm ah. My internal monologue here was like what
Speaker 2: and yes, I looked it up. Keep America Beautiful is
Speaker 2: a nonprofit. It was founded in aineteen fifty three by
Speaker 2: the beverage and packaging industry and Philip Morris and other
Speaker 2: tobacco giants. So by campaigning to have volunteers picking up
Speaker 2: cigarette butts on their weekends, they could sway legislation away
Speaker 2: from smoking bands on beaches and in parks. So Pepsi Coke,
Speaker 2: Nesley McDonald's, Dow Chemical, and other places with deep pockets
Speaker 2: and high steaks. Fund Keep America Beautiful to make sure
Speaker 2: that the focus stays on litter and recycling and your
Speaker 2: personal responsibility instead of the responsibility of the manufacturers and
Speaker 2: the distributors of plastics in the first place. And there's
Speaker 2: this one infamous nineteen seventy Keep America Beautiful ad and
Speaker 2: in an Indigenous man wearing a fringed buckskin pants suit
Speaker 2: rose his birch bark canoe down a river that's thick
Speaker 2: with trash, and in the shadow of these billowing factories,
Speaker 2: so ominous, and he hauls his canoe onto a littered
Speaker 2: beach and in a close up we see a single
Speaker 2: tier streaming down his face. With the message people start pollution, people.
Speaker 4: Can stop it.
Speaker 2: That native actor iron Eyes Cody side Note, was actually
Speaker 2: not at all indigenous. He was Italian. His birth name
Speaker 2: was Espera Oscar de Corti. He lied his whole life
Speaker 2: about it. But the message people start pollution, people can
Speaker 2: stop it? Does that include companies? The PSA seems to
Speaker 2: skirt over the American notion of corporate personhood. But if
Speaker 2: you don't own a multi billion dollar company that sells
Speaker 2: sugar water in plastic bottles, how much responsibility can a
Speaker 2: person bear? We can make a difference, though, right. And
Speaker 2: so when you see, you know, three different trash cans.
Speaker 2: One says recyclables, one says composting, and one says landfill,
Speaker 2: which is like a good way to make you think, like,
Speaker 2: am I going to be lazy and put it all
Speaker 2: in the landfill thing? You're like, no, that makes me
Speaker 2: a shitty person. I'm going to sit here and figure
Speaker 2: out which of these napkins is compostable? Do those things
Speaker 2: really make it to those destinations?
Speaker 3: It depends where are we talking about. We mean New
Speaker 3: York City. They're called PSR Public Space Recycling receptacles. They
Speaker 3: are collected by different trucks with different destinations. Oh okay,
Speaker 3: the problem becomes as you touch on are those different
Speaker 3: bins contaminated? So for compost, does someone throw out the
Speaker 3: plastic water bottles or the plastic bag? Well, if it's
Speaker 3: contaminated beyond a certain point, you cannot take it to
Speaker 3: the recycling facility or the compost yard because it really
Speaker 3: now is just garbage. The same with recyclables. If you
Speaker 3: put too much food waste in the recycle bin, you
Speaker 3: gum up the works at the recycling facility. So yes,
Speaker 3: it's going to go to the right place if we
Speaker 3: put it in the right bin. And it's often very confusing.
Speaker 3: If you have a single use coffee cup from you
Speaker 3: name the major barista source of coffee, it's a paper exterior,
Speaker 3: it's often a plastic line interior, and then you have
Speaker 3: the plastic of a different polymer that is the lid.
Speaker 3: Where does that go?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: It depends on the system that a given collection process
Speaker 3: is using. Does the municipality take that plastic lined paper
Speaker 3: and they do it through paper recycling or does that
Speaker 3: go through plastic recycling? So there is no national standard?
Speaker 3: Should there be? Maybe if there isn't, that partly means
Speaker 3: that manufacturers can keep making it up as they go along,
Speaker 3: and then you have this plethora of materials that have
Speaker 3: no clear next step and also are very complex to
Speaker 3: break down into components that can be recycled.
Speaker 2: So you can check with your local regulations, but I
Speaker 2: just checked them in California, and plastics with a one
Speaker 2: or two on them it's called an SPI code for
Speaker 2: Society of the Plastics Industry, which sounds very fake. But
Speaker 2: the SBI codes one or two chuck in the recycling bin,
Speaker 2: and I guess plastic bottles with codes three through seven
Speaker 2: can be returned to recycling centers and you may get
Speaker 2: a deposit back for them. But recycling cans and clean
Speaker 2: aluminum foil is definitely possible. Electronic waste should never go
Speaker 2: into landfills, but recycling centers will take it. Batteries same thing,
Speaker 2: and of course recycling organic waste by composting is a
Speaker 2: great idea. Apparently twenty percent of the US food supply
Speaker 2: is tossed away. It's about ninety six billion pounds of
Speaker 2: food waste a year. That plus yard waste is a
Speaker 2: third of what gets thrown into landfills. And I was like, well,
Speaker 2: at least that's biodegradable, right, not as much as you think.
Speaker 2: When it gets tossed in a landfill, it makes way
Speaker 2: more methane gas, which is twenty three times more potent
Speaker 2: than carbon dioxide in terms of greenhouse gases and global warming.
Speaker 2: But when you're posting it, it's broken down aerobically because
Speaker 2: it's interfacing with oxygen more, and it produces way less
Speaker 2: methane than when it gets tossed in a landfill. And
Speaker 2: you got a lawn to mow. Suburban dwellers leave those
Speaker 2: lawn clippings right on the lawn. You don't have to
Speaker 2: rake them up, you don't have to go put them
Speaker 2: in a bin. Apparently it'll act as fertilizer. Your lawn's
Speaker 2: gonna love it. So now you don't have to get
Speaker 2: a bunch of cut grass up your nose throwing it
Speaker 2: in the green bin. So you're walks. But back to
Speaker 2: Manhattan now, getting back to you just going over cobblestone
Speaker 2: driving a garbage truck? Is it called the garbage truck
Speaker 2: or a collection truck?
Speaker 3: A collection truck and which let me just add, yeah,
Speaker 3: I find that the coolest euphemistic. It's quite real and
Speaker 3: a euphemism. I'm on collection. What do you collect old clocks,
Speaker 3: you know, like Barbie Dolls, cabbage patchel. Yeah, I'm on
Speaker 3: collection today. I do collection, but I'm collecting. I am
Speaker 3: collecting garbage. So a collection truck. It's a very accurate
Speaker 3: the acurate, but it's also it could mean so much else, right.
Speaker 3: I love that. I love that it's called that.
Speaker 2: And when you are collecting, how were you collecting? Just
Speaker 2: the garbage bags on the side of the sidewalk, which,
Speaker 2: by the way, as a Californian, as a West Coaster,
Speaker 2: I'm like, oh, you just put the hefty bag on
Speaker 2: the sidewalk. It just goes on the sidewalk. There's no
Speaker 2: like cans to drag in necessarily.
Speaker 3: Depends on the neighborhood.
Speaker 2: Okay, oh okay, I didn't know that. Yeah, do those
Speaker 2: get flung on the truck and sorted later or where
Speaker 2: does that go?
Speaker 3: So when you say sorted.
Speaker 2: What do you mean, Like, let's say that you've got
Speaker 2: a black plastic bag full of garbage. Does that get
Speaker 2: opened and cans go one way? Robin was shaking her head. No,
Speaker 2: like I had just landed from a distant utopian galaxy.
Speaker 3: No, that just goes landfill or incinerator. I'm sorry, waste
Speaker 3: to energy facility.
Speaker 2: Waste to energy facility? Is that?
Speaker 3: So?
Speaker 2: Yeah, walk me through a little bit. What happens when
Speaker 2: you're a plastic bag on the sidewalk and where does
Speaker 2: it go When someone like you says I'm here to
Speaker 2: make the city cleaner.
Speaker 3: It goes in the back of the truck, and then,
Speaker 3: depending on what part of the city that truck is in,
Speaker 3: it will go to a transfer facility, meaning I'm now
Speaker 3: emptying the truck into a different point of its journey.
Speaker 3: And then in some cases that next step is the
Speaker 3: last step. So in several different Manhattan districts, all of
Speaker 3: the household garbage goes to that waste of energy facility
Speaker 3: In Essex, New Jersey, it's a fascinating plant. I was
Speaker 3: lucky enough to have a tour last spring. And incineration
Speaker 3: is always the big bad guy in the room. However,
Speaker 3: and I'm going to get killed for saying this, but
Speaker 3: in terms of what gets off gassed and the kinds
Speaker 3: of pollutants that are released and the kinds of hazards
Speaker 3: that are created, incineration, by some arguments, is a far
Speaker 3: better choice than a landfill. So if someone says to you,
Speaker 3: all right, we have to put a land you're going
Speaker 3: to live down stream, down wind from a landfill or
Speaker 3: an incinerator, pick one. I would pick the incinerator.
Speaker 2: Wow, okay.
Speaker 3: And it's partly just what I've learned doing research on
Speaker 3: this for years, but then also seeing the kinds of
Speaker 3: standards that those facilities are held to and the oversight
Speaker 3: that is imposed on them to make sure those standards
Speaker 3: are met. It's not perfect, of course, I'm not saying that,
Speaker 3: but there is no perfect solution yet. And yeah, I
Speaker 3: would choose. Oh man, I'm going to get absolutely slammed.
Speaker 2: But that's also that's an informed opinion, though you know
Speaker 2: it's informed an opinion, but.
Speaker 3: You write an opinion. Quite so it's my opinion. But
Speaker 3: so all right, So from some districts it goes straight
Speaker 3: to that facility. Other districts it goes to a transfer station.
Speaker 3: Where it goes out by barge or by rail and
Speaker 3: then it ends up in upstate New York or Virginia.
Speaker 3: There is no longer a location within New York City
Speaker 3: where we dispose of our own garbage. The last landfill
Speaker 3: closed in two thousand and one. It's fresh kills on
Speaker 3: the west central coast of Staten Island. Yeah, so have
Speaker 3: we send it far away?
Speaker 2: Last?
Speaker 3: I knew the recyclables. Once they are sorted at facilities
Speaker 3: in Brooklyn and Queens and New Jersey, they go to
Speaker 3: nine different states for the next step of their processing.
Speaker 2: And with plastics, I understand that we sell our recycling overseas.
Speaker 3: Sometimes we sent a lot of our plastics to China,
Speaker 3: and China said to us, Okay, look, we have an
Speaker 3: agreement about rates of contamination. They can only be a
Speaker 3: very very small percentage. And you all are blowing that
Speaker 3: percentage over and over and over, and our side of
Speaker 3: the Pacific were like, yeah, okay, sorry, my bad, and
Speaker 3: we kept doing it. So China in twenty eighteen finally
Speaker 3: said enough, no more, we don't take it. Wow, And
Speaker 3: so it created a ripple across the world of recycling
Speaker 3: that is still it's those ripples are still being felt
Speaker 3: because they were our primary buyer of plastics, plastic waste recyclables,
Speaker 3: and so now where do they go? It could have
Speaker 3: sent that ripple back up the manufacturing process to be like, ah,
Speaker 3: maybe this is a good time to take a look
Speaker 3: at why we create so much plastic waste and figure
Speaker 3: out how to stop doing that hasn't yet had that impact.
Speaker 2: Was this from people who don't fully rinse them as
Speaker 2: jar before tossing it in the I think.
Speaker 3: It was more than that. I think it was actually
Speaker 3: mixing plastics with like really gross shitty trash in big
Speaker 3: enough quantities that when you break up in the baiale
Speaker 3: of what's supposed to just be plastic and now you
Speaker 3: find stuff that not only can you not reprocess that,
Speaker 3: you're now putting those workers in harm's way, and like
Speaker 3: it just from what I understand, it was more than
Speaker 3: just missus McGillicutty did not rinse her yogurt.
Speaker 2: Container, okay, because every time I've like got a peanut
Speaker 2: butter container on those are the worst, right, I know,
Speaker 2: I'm like, I gotta get some hot water in this,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: And then how much energy are you using to clean
Speaker 3: it versus how much energy is going to be used
Speaker 3: to recycle it? But really not, you're going to downside.
Speaker 3: So I feel you you.
Speaker 2: Were not the only person to wonder how clean is clean?
Speaker 2: And according to the employee owned San Francisco waste management
Speaker 2: company Recology, well done. They say, please empty all food
Speaker 2: residue and liquids from your food containers, from your cans, bottles,
Speaker 2: jars before tossing them in the recycling container. And they say,
Speaker 2: for example, if there's a small amount of ketchup remaining
Speaker 2: in the bottle, give it a quick rinse to ensure
Speaker 2: you don't contaminate other recycled paper or plastic products. And
Speaker 2: they suggest to conserve water. You can rinse the containers
Speaker 2: with sink water after you wash dishes, just kind of
Speaker 2: like splogy spoogee in there. So, if you have ever
Speaker 2: thrown away a squeeze bottle with two fingers of stubborn
Speaker 2: mustard at the bottom, and then created a narrative that
Speaker 2: they probably like, boil off the mustard, we have something
Speaker 2: in common. We were both wrong. Now, what about recycling
Speaker 2: in a less melt it down and reform it kind
Speaker 2: of way. What about you on the collection route? Did
Speaker 2: you ever see like an antique hutch that you were like, well,
Speaker 2: holy shit, I'm going to come back here with a
Speaker 2: truck later and get that myself.
Speaker 3: All the time, really, oh yeah, And so that's a
Speaker 3: category of garbage called mango, and mango is either the
Speaker 3: thing itself or the act of deciding to retrieve them.
Speaker 3: My best ever was after a big snowstorm when the
Speaker 3: whole workforce of the Apartment of Sanitation was put on
Speaker 3: snow removal, meaning they're not picking up the garbage, but
Speaker 3: we're still making the garbage. We never stop making the garbage,
Speaker 3: and it piles up and piles up and piles up,
Speaker 3: so finally the streets are clear enough to put people
Speaker 3: back on it. Then it's called chasing garbage. And I'm
Speaker 3: on a block behind the Dakota, the fancy apartment building
Speaker 3: on the upper west side, and the garbage is as
Speaker 3: the pile is as high as my shoulder, and it's
Speaker 3: from one end of this long block to the other.
Speaker 3: And it's raining and it's cold, and it's late in
Speaker 3: the day and the truck is so full it's almost bulging,
Speaker 3: and we're done. We can't fit anymore in the truck.
Speaker 3: And one of my partners. There's one bag. He just
Speaker 3: tosses one last bag, but he has a sense of
Speaker 3: like where there might be something cool inside of it
Speaker 3: given bag, so he opens it up, which you're not
Speaker 3: supposed to do, but he opens it up, and inside,
Speaker 3: folded as if on someone's closet shelf, are a set
Speaker 3: of really beautiful clothing, not fancy, but like high end
Speaker 3: brands of jeans and shirts. And they all happen to
Speaker 3: be my size. And so he says, do you want this?
Speaker 3: I'm like, hell, yes, So I take those home. I
Speaker 3: did take them to the cleaners, you know. But then
Speaker 3: for years I had this really great wardrobe adendum that
Speaker 3: all came from somewhere in the I mean the famous
Speaker 3: people live in the Dakota. I don't know. Maybe it
Speaker 3: was somebody's famous Lucky brand jeans.
Speaker 2: Don't Yeah, anyway, that's a good find.
Speaker 3: It was a great find. I've found some great stuff.
Speaker 3: But then there are people who There's a fellow named
Speaker 3: Nelson Molina who was on the job for almost thirty
Speaker 3: five years, and he worked for the vast majority of
Speaker 3: those years in East Harlem and the Upper East Side.
Speaker 3: So his route that district splits some of the wealthiest
Speaker 3: zip codes on the planet with housing projects and people
Speaker 3: who are not wealthy, and he has a very finely
Speaker 3: tuned sense of when there's something being thrown out that
Speaker 3: really does not deserve to be thrown out. And over
Speaker 3: his years on the job, he assembled this astonishing collection
Speaker 3: of tens of thousands of objects that he has on display.
Speaker 3: It's not open to the public yet, we hope to
Speaker 3: fold it into what will eventually be the Museum for Sanitation.
Speaker 3: But between his genius for recognizing when there's something special
Speaker 3: in the trash and then his curatorial genius of how
Speaker 3: it's ranged, it's dazzling.
Speaker 2: My senses are go off, look in the bag and boom,
Speaker 2: there it is. That was a clip from the twenty
Speaker 2: fifteen film One Man's Trash, which was directed and produced
Speaker 2: by Kelly Adams. And I'll include a Vimeo link on
Speaker 2: my website. But it's delightful and charming and dare I
Speaker 2: say inspiring.
Speaker 3: So that's like Mongo madness, Mongo majesty, mango beauty, and
Speaker 3: the stuff that people throughout baptismal certificates and wedding photos
Speaker 3: and really beautifully framed diplomas from high like Columbia Law
Speaker 3: and Harvard, you know, like things you think, whoa these
Speaker 3: are for life. In fact, one of the diplomas, some
Speaker 3: journalists were through and they contacted the woman whose name
Speaker 3: was on one of these fancy diplomas, who's now living
Speaker 3: somewhere in Europe, and they're like, you want it back?
Speaker 3: Just like, hell no, I don't want it. I don't
Speaker 3: want it. So yeah, Nelson's collection is cool for many reasons,
Speaker 3: but one of them is it really asks you to
Speaker 3: think about how these things that our treasures were defined
Speaker 3: as trash by somebody, and why is it so easy
Speaker 3: to do that? And shouldn't there be other ways of
Speaker 3: ridding yourself of something you don't want anymore besides putting
Speaker 3: it on the curve for our garbage truck? And then
Speaker 3: what might those systems be? The challenge is time. If
Speaker 3: Aunt Gladys dies and I'm her last living relative and
Speaker 3: I've got to clear out her apartment and it's fifty
Speaker 3: years of whatever were her treasures, but I don't want them.
Speaker 3: Am I going to spend the weeks and weeks and
Speaker 3: weeks of finding those new homes? Or I'm just going
Speaker 3: to put it on the curb, right, yeah, I'm going
Speaker 3: to put it on the curb, So I mean I
Speaker 3: generically speaking, So it just points to the need for
Speaker 3: different systems, the question about our relationship to time in general,
Speaker 3: and then gratitude for Nelson's stubbornness in deciding this treadle
Speaker 3: singer sewing machine with all its parts, should not be
Speaker 3: in the trash or this film projector that can only
Speaker 3: show really really really old films, and look, there are
Speaker 3: the really really old silent movies right and like. And
Speaker 3: he has a whole wall of just ferbies as a whole,
Speaker 3: just a pez dispenser. So some of it is, you know,
Speaker 3: sut lovely silly things. But he has a whole thing
Speaker 3: of photographs. You can spend a long time looking at
Speaker 3: the table of photographs. Who are they? And why were
Speaker 3: those thrown out? And who let go of them? And
Speaker 3: are any of them still alive? And most of them
Speaker 3: have no identifying information. They're just pictures.
Speaker 2: If you want to feel sad and scared and oddly invigorated,
Speaker 2: look up Swedish death cleaning, which is like maricondoing your life.
Speaker 2: But while asking the question do I want my bereaved
Speaker 2: loved ones sobbing into this casserole dish I never used.
Speaker 2: I'm sure if they should give it a good will.
Speaker 2: So clean out your stuff so that other people don't
Speaker 2: have to make decisions for you after you die. It's
Speaker 2: pretty simple, and the steaks seem very high, which is
Speaker 2: what I need to get motivated to clean out a cabinet.
Speaker 2: On that note, a dear friend of mine recently went
Speaker 2: to an estate sale in LA and left with a
Speaker 2: box of items that they were going to throw in
Speaker 2: the trash. They were like, go ahead and take it.
Speaker 2: Seemed like it had some cool stuff in it. Turns
Speaker 2: out the house belonged to a local archaeology professor and
Speaker 2: inside the box were some colorful pottery shards, and she
Speaker 2: asked me if I could find out anything about these
Speaker 2: pottery shards, and via social media, you all connected me
Speaker 2: to an expert in this type of ceramics. And the
Speaker 2: box that my friend acquired from the late professor contained
Speaker 2: irreplaceable artifacts from a nineteen eighty six Central American archaeological dig.
Speaker 2: And as my friend looked deeper in the box, she
Speaker 2: texted me in horror that there was a ziplock of
Speaker 2: human bones from a burial ground in Guatemala. So this
Speaker 2: friend tried to save some pottery from a landfill, and
Speaker 2: now we're literally working with the State Department and the
Speaker 2: Consulate to repatriate human remains to Central America that should
Speaker 2: have never been in a box in a closet. So
Speaker 2: spring cleaning once a year. Let's go through all of
Speaker 2: our shit as if we were about to die. Return
Speaker 2: your desecration human remains back to their country of origin
Speaker 2: before a stranger accidentally buys them at your estate sale.
Speaker 2: Sell some sweaters on eBay, put a lamp on Mercari Marketplace, Craigslist,
Speaker 2: I don't care. Use the buy nothing groups on Facebook
Speaker 2: in your area. Do not accidentally hoard archaeological artifacts. Ever,
Speaker 2: Has anyone ever teamed up with an economist to try
Speaker 2: to figure out how much wealth and resource is in
Speaker 2: the trash? What's the value of the trash?
Speaker 3: So value defined by whom in what context? If I
Speaker 3: am running a private waste company, that trash is worth
Speaker 3: a lot of money to me, and if I am
Speaker 3: doing separation of its components and I can find ways
Speaker 3: to monetize what is otherwise just this clump of something
Speaker 3: smelly that we call garbage, there's a lot of wealth
Speaker 3: in that connect is the individual person is letting go
Speaker 3: of that wealth, and then somewhere in its next step,
Speaker 3: somebody else is deciding no, no, there's gold in them
Speaker 3: in oar bags.
Speaker 2: But what is the value and who owns it once
Speaker 2: it's discarded, right?
Speaker 3: And who says who decides what that value is? In
Speaker 3: terms of who owns it? And we're talking a lot
Speaker 3: about New yorkcase. It's a situation I know best. But
Speaker 3: once it's on the curb, if it's municipal waste, it
Speaker 3: belongs to the City of New York, you don't own
Speaker 3: it anymore. New York City owns it, and there have
Speaker 3: been legal tug of wars about that very issue. New
Speaker 3: York also has two other primary categories of waste, though,
Speaker 3: which is commercial business waste, which is collected only by
Speaker 3: private companies, private waste companies, and then construction and Demolition
Speaker 3: debris or CND, which is a third category. The bureaucracy
Speaker 3: behind these different categories is pretty thick, which is partly
Speaker 3: about preventing corruption and partly about health and safety.
Speaker 2: And what about parts of cities that are built on garbage?
Speaker 3: Well, I do a talk, in fact, almost every talk
Speaker 3: I do about garbage. Starts with a map of Lower Manhattan,
Speaker 3: the original shoreline, with this web on top, which is
Speaker 3: the contemporary street grid. And I have a pin on
Speaker 3: the five places where Peter Stuyvesant told New Amsterdam colonists
Speaker 3: in sixteen fifty seven, here's where you are allowed to
Speaker 3: throw out your trash. And it's all on the water's edge.
Speaker 3: And if you look at that, the last pin I
Speaker 3: show is at a place called Coente's Slip and Pearl Street,
Speaker 3: and then I show a slide of that exact place
Speaker 3: with the same pin, and it's three blocks in from
Speaker 3: the water's edge. And all of that is various forms
Speaker 3: of pill much of which is garbage. While Robert Moses
Speaker 3: was sort of the informal dictator of New York City
Speaker 3: and New York State, he determined where every ton of
Speaker 3: garbage was deposited so that he would make land.
Speaker 2: Robert Moses, what a character. Wow. So he deposited garbage
Speaker 2: in areas where poor people lived, and even designed low
Speaker 2: underpasses so that people without cars meaning folks who ride
Speaker 2: the bus, couldn't access public beaches. It was like no car,
Speaker 2: no beach. And one place where the land was built
Speaker 2: up is on a place called Barren Island, part of Brooklyn.
Speaker 2: Exact beach is called dead Horse Bay, which I can't
Speaker 2: be called dead Horse Bay because the dead horse is
Speaker 2: in it, right, that's got to be metaphorical. Nope. There
Speaker 2: was a glue factory where all the pre automobile dead
Speaker 2: horses were sent to and the waters of dead Horse
Speaker 2: Bay were littered with chopped up dead horse bones. Dead
Speaker 2: Horse Bay also smelled a lot like dead horses. But
Speaker 2: the land was filled up with the city's trash and
Speaker 2: covered with just a dusting of top soil that washed away.
Speaker 2: And to this day you can walk along Glass Bottle
Speaker 2: Beach kind of like a watery time capsule of t
Speaker 2: trash deposited in early nineteen fifty three. There are rusted
Speaker 2: cash registers, tires, warped crusty leather shoes, soda bottles of
Speaker 2: all kinds, and yes, the occasional horsebone. And I should
Speaker 2: say you can't actually walk along the shore as it
Speaker 2: was closed two years ago after radioactive waste was found
Speaker 2: in thirty one different spots. So they're working on it,
Speaker 2: but you can google pictures so many bottles. People say
Speaker 2: it sounds like gently clinking champagne flutes or shimmering windshimes
Speaker 2: as the bay laps at the glass.
Speaker 3: And so we are literally walking on our own history,
Speaker 3: our own archaeology all the time. But that's not unique
Speaker 3: to New York at all. Cities all over the world
Speaker 3: have done this since time immemorial.
Speaker 2: How does the garbage not just float out to sea?
Speaker 3: Well? Sometimes it does, oops, sometimes it does. It depends
Speaker 3: on how well built the landfill is, how what kind
Speaker 3: of what innovative construction was put in place for it.
Speaker 3: There are parts of the city where it is just
Speaker 3: eroding back out into the city. Not many, but there's some.
Speaker 2: I have so many questions from listeners, can I ask you?
Speaker 2: Of course, oh my gosh. But as always before your questions,
Speaker 2: we have some money to discard toward a worthy cause
Speaker 2: chosen by theologist, and Robin pointed us toward the Sanitation Foundation,
Speaker 2: which is the official nonprofit partner of the New York
Speaker 2: City Department of Sanitation, and their mission is to keep
Speaker 2: the city clean while celebrating and supporting the essential sanitation
Speaker 2: workforce and advancing the city's ambitious zero waste agenda. They're
Speaker 2: also making the first ever New York City Sanitation museum
Speaker 2: featuring the Treasures in the Trash, collected and curated by
Speaker 2: Nelson Molina, who we talked about earlier. So find out
Speaker 2: more or donate yourself at Sanitation Foundation dot org. And
Speaker 2: that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show.
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Speaker 2: Okay, let's get through your inquiries. They have so much value,
Speaker 2: so many good questions. I'm just gonna start straight out
Speaker 2: with Kyla Kelly's question, who asked, how fucked are we?
Speaker 2: Allian Meyer says, Okay, seriously, how much garbage is there?
Speaker 2: Kelly Shaver wants to know how much trash is on earth?
Speaker 2: Just how how fucked?
Speaker 3: So I think because of plastics, we're seriously fucked.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's my thought.
Speaker 3: Yeah. In terms of a metric of like how precisely
Speaker 3: fucked are we? I'm not. I wouldn't have a I
Speaker 3: don't know. I have a child, and I am often
Speaker 3: lying awake at night seriously worried about the future that
Speaker 3: that child, that child is twenty three, that child is
Speaker 3: no longer tiny, but that child is young enough. Maybe
Speaker 3: they will have a child of their own someday. What
Speaker 3: what crisis are we guaranteed to leave them? And I
Speaker 3: can't answer it, but the possibilities are numberless. So yeah,
Speaker 3: very fucked. Yeah, thank you for that question.
Speaker 2: Yeah, think, I mean that's a that was the answer.
Speaker 2: I thought, good to hear from an expert.
Speaker 3: That's my expert.
Speaker 2: Yes. Robin later emailed me to say that though she
Speaker 2: came off as rather emphatic about it. She wanted to
Speaker 2: add that being fucked is not the same as being hopeless,
Speaker 2: and where we're at if things don't change, is really bad,
Speaker 2: but that hoping and striving for change and improvement is
Speaker 2: still the right move as always, So don't throw your
Speaker 2: good intentions in the garbage. Besides, is there even room
Speaker 2: for them? Christina, We wants to know is there a
Speaker 2: real possibility of running out of places to put our garbage?
Speaker 2: And the movie Wally comes to mind when they think
Speaker 2: of this, They say, have you seen Wally?
Speaker 3: Five times? I love Wally. Wally, It's one of my
Speaker 3: favorite movies. No, we are not running out of places,
Speaker 3: in part because more current landfill technology uses a cellular system,
Speaker 3: whereby you are encouraging the decomposition of what's in there,
Speaker 3: so it happens faster than if you just bury it
Speaker 3: and walk away and then each so there's like a
Speaker 3: quadrangle of cells, and when the last cell is as
Speaker 3: decomposed as it can be, it's much less quantity and
Speaker 3: so you can reuse it. Also, there are vast stretches
Speaker 3: of I mean, if we wanted to, we could fill
Speaker 3: all those lovely planes of the Midwest and the rural
Speaker 3: area like we can. If we want to keep land filling,
Speaker 3: we will not run out of space for a very very,
Speaker 3: very long time. It's going to cost arms and legs
Speaker 3: and heads and toes to get it where we want
Speaker 3: it to go right by whatever transportation we choose. But
Speaker 3: if we want to do that, we're not going to
Speaker 3: run out of space anytime soon.
Speaker 2: Is it more about not producing so much.
Speaker 3: Municipal solid waste in the United States? And that's the
Speaker 3: technical term for what most people think of when they
Speaker 3: hear the word garbage, like what's in your kitchen waste
Speaker 3: basket or on the curb, in the litter basket. That
Speaker 3: accounts for at the very very most three percent of
Speaker 3: the nation's waste stream. So I talked earlier about propaganda.
Speaker 3: There is a lot of attention to what's at the
Speaker 3: curb and where it goes and the harms it causes,
Speaker 3: all of which are real, but off stage, with far
Speaker 3: less public attention are the far more harmful, much larger
Speaker 3: quantities of waste from a host of industrial and agricultural
Speaker 3: and mining and medical systems, among other big categories. So yes,
Speaker 3: we should make less, but it's again this question of scale.
Speaker 3: It has to see gale up beyond us as people,
Speaker 3: individuals and individual cities. Again, I'm not therefore saying we
Speaker 3: shouldn't recycle, we shouldn't generate less waste in our own lives,
Speaker 3: because that is the start. We don't smoke in almost
Speaker 3: any public venue anymore. That happened because of a confluence
Speaker 3: of influence from scientists, health experts, and just plain old
Speaker 3: people who were tired of getting their air polluted everywhere
Speaker 3: they went, as well as the devastating health consequences of
Speaker 3: smoking cigarettes.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So it wasn't because the government woke up one day
Speaker 3: and said, oh my, we should stop people from smoking
Speaker 3: because it would be good for them. That's not what happened.
Speaker 3: It happened from the ground up. One of my dreams
Speaker 3: is that plastic water bottles will be similarly scarce in
Speaker 3: the world from a similar kind of push, Because if
Speaker 3: we really believe that, then the change is within our power,
Speaker 3: together with each other. It has to be a coalition.
Speaker 3: It can't just be me, myself and I.
Speaker 2: And for anyone wondering when plastic water bottles started choking
Speaker 2: the planet, you can look no further than the marketing
Speaker 2: success of Perrier water in the nineteen seventies because reports
Speaker 2: linking diet sodas to health risks started rising, and so
Speaker 2: this French mineral water became very popular through marketing to
Speaker 2: the yuppie community, and then Nesli bought Perier in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety two. Pepsi entered the arena, launching Aquafina in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety five, and then Coke hopped in the bottled water
Speaker 2: waters in nineteen ninety nine when they launched Disani. Did
Speaker 2: you know that Aquafina and Disanni or Pepsi and Cooke?
Speaker 2: Did you know that? Did you also know the huge secret?
Speaker 2: Most of that water, even if it purports to be
Speaker 2: from like Yosemite springs or whatnot, it's actually just tapwater.
Speaker 2: It's just municipal water, filtered, bottled, and it costs more
Speaker 2: than gasoline per gallon. We've been had, but patrons Susi
Speaker 2: Shipman and Ellik Ray both asked if we'll ever go
Speaker 2: back to a less wasteful and maybe plastic free existence.
Speaker 3: There's a brilliant book called Waste and Want by a
Speaker 3: historian named Susan Strasser, and she delves deep into how
Speaker 3: disposability became our preferred choice over reuse. For example, you're
Speaker 3: on a train, you go to the restroom, it used
Speaker 3: to be a towel that rolled, which I remember those
Speaker 3: two right now. I think people might be horrified to
Speaker 3: go into the Amtrak restroom and not have a paper
Speaker 3: towel to use. Same with. There used to be public
Speaker 3: drinking options around the city with cups on chains attached
Speaker 3: to the fountain, so you could just dip the cup
Speaker 3: and drink from the cup. I don't think we would
Speaker 3: do that anymore, and there are good reasons why we
Speaker 3: would hesitate to do it. But the alternative of a
Speaker 3: discardable single use that creates a host of nightmares that
Speaker 3: are you know, sort of on the other side of it.
Speaker 3: So the other thing about the rise of single use plastics,
Speaker 3: you're selling more right plastics they they're manufactured and sold.
Speaker 3: And the more single use utensils we use with our
Speaker 3: takeout food, or the more wrap we have around our
Speaker 3: throwaway Dixie cup, whatever it is, somebody's making money on that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: So partly it's followed the dollar.
Speaker 2: That's a really interesting moran.
Speaker 3: There are still city water fountains all over the place,
Speaker 3: and I drink from them without any hesitation, and New
Speaker 3: York City water is famously wonderful and healthy and pure, etc.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I at least love seeing more places in
Speaker 2: airports where you can refill a water bottle, especially since
Speaker 2: you know in an airport the consumers in there comes
Speaker 2: with a nine dollars price tag to get a glass
Speaker 2: of waters. You're like, well, Kelly Brockington and Ella had
Speaker 2: great questions. Ella wants to know what's the difference between
Speaker 2: garbage and rubbish and Kelly ass garbage versus trash versus litter?
Speaker 2: Please define are are there? Are there different definitions?
Speaker 3: Not really anymore, I would say, but there used to be.
Speaker 3: There used to be distinctions. I think now they're just
Speaker 3: the thesaurus would give you rubbish or garbage or trash
Speaker 3: as synonymous. Litter is different. Litter is sort of waste
Speaker 3: out of place, Like you know, it's not supposed to
Speaker 3: be at the curb or on the street. It's supposed
Speaker 3: to be in a litter basket or a garbage bag,
Speaker 3: or a truck or a landfill. It's not supposed to
Speaker 3: be loose. There's a fantastic novel by one of my
Speaker 3: all time favorite authors, China Mieville and the authors called unlundone.
Speaker 3: And one of the key characters is feral trash, and
Speaker 3: I think of litter as feral trash.
Speaker 2: It is funny because once you put it in a
Speaker 2: litter basket, it's no longer litter.
Speaker 3: Correct, but it trash in general, and litter in particular
Speaker 3: has a way of escaping its confinements.
Speaker 2: And Robin says that in the eighteen nineties, New York
Speaker 2: had more clear distinctions between garbage, which usually denoted food waste,
Speaker 2: rubbish or trash, which was other items, and excelsior, which
Speaker 2: sounds like a model of suv like the Lincoln Excelsior,
Speaker 2: but it really just means wood shavings and sawdust. And
Speaker 2: of course American English favors garbage or trash. Brits call
Speaker 2: it rubbish and their garbage cans or dust bins after
Speaker 2: the coal ashes that they collected. But anyway, yes, nice names,
Speaker 2: gross stuff.
Speaker 3: Rubbish sounds cuter, Rubbish sounds more sophisticate.
Speaker 2: It does. It sounds less smelly than garbage.
Speaker 3: It certainly does. YEA, garbage sounds gross, but rubbish.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of folks, I'll list them in an aside.
Speaker 2: Joe Mueller, Bree Bree Stewart, Maria Dnay Dejurnee, Justin Sosiito,
Speaker 2: and Pauline Dipierre. I want to know about people. Are
Speaker 2: people go into the dump? Is that a disposition method?
Speaker 2: How often do people turn up in dumps?
Speaker 3: What people and what dumps? And what do you mean
Speaker 3: by dumps?
Speaker 2: Like how often are their dead bodies or body parts?
Speaker 3: Oh you mean oh that I thought you meant how
Speaker 3: often people just go into the dump because you know
Speaker 3: it's Friday night, you got nothing.
Speaker 2: To do, Let's go to the dump.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, which in fact people do?
Speaker 2: We have fun. I took you in a dump.
Speaker 3: I let you shoot my gun and some rats.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Because some smaller towns, some smaller dumps, they put aside
Speaker 3: things that might be useful and you can do Like
Speaker 3: there's a fantastic one I go to sometimes in Vermont
Speaker 3: that has a whole little building full of stuff that
Speaker 3: people don'tant anymore, but somebody else might want it, and
Speaker 3: it's it's always fun to rummage the round through that
Speaker 3: non rubbish. In terms of bodies going to dumps, of course,
Speaker 3: I mean that happens. It's uh. There have been sort
Speaker 3: of myth level stories about human bodies who have been
Speaker 3: buried at fresh Kills landfill in New York City. Of course,
Speaker 3: there are cartoonish stories about mobsters getting rid of their
Speaker 3: enemies in the landfills of the Meadowlands and other parts
Speaker 3: and landfills in this part of the world. Almost certainly
Speaker 3: there are, but I don't have firm stories about it.
Speaker 2: But that's not why fresh kills is called fresh kill.
Speaker 3: No fresh kills. The name comes from the roots are
Speaker 3: in Dutch kills like catskill peak skill. It means near
Speaker 3: a creek or stream, So it has nothing to do
Speaker 3: with death.
Speaker 2: Okay, But I mean, you've never seen like a hand
Speaker 2: sticking out of something happening.
Speaker 3: I have not, But Sarah, sanitation workers I've worked with,
Speaker 3: you have what's the protocol? All kinds of city agencies, police, county, court,
Speaker 3: the Medical Examiner's office, Department of Health. There's a whole
Speaker 3: I don't know what the protocols are, but there's this.
Speaker 3: It activates a whole lot of response.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh are rugs? Do rugs get a bad rep
Speaker 2: for a reason?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Sometimes? Yes. Also, there was a story from a
Speaker 3: few years ago that crew was working a block and
Speaker 3: someone had discarded a couch and as they put it
Speaker 3: into the back of the truck, thousands of dollars worth
Speaker 3: of cocaine fell out of it. Oh yeah, big oopsie.
Speaker 2: Is there a protocol for that or is it just
Speaker 2: like put that on eBay see what you can get. Yeah.
Speaker 3: No, they would have been fired and jailed if they
Speaker 3: had done that.
Speaker 2: That's a good point. I guess not worth that. Did
Speaker 2: you hear the story about the guy who threw away
Speaker 2: a disdrive full of bitcoin?
Speaker 3: I did hear that?
Speaker 2: Has he reached out to you to be like, can
Speaker 2: you help me out here?
Speaker 3: Was he even in New York? No?
Speaker 2: I think he was in the Essex or something. Think
Speaker 2: he was British. Yeah. So. James Howells, a Welsh computer engineer,
Speaker 2: accidentally tossed some bitcoin into a landfill in twenty thirteen
Speaker 2: and has spent nearly a decade and potentially millions of
Speaker 2: dollars developing AI trash scanning schemes and robot dogs to
Speaker 2: help him locate this disk drive with his bitcoins. How
Speaker 2: many bitcoins eight thousand, which are worth about one hundred
Speaker 2: and forty five million dollars, even with bitcoin dropping to
Speaker 2: less than a third of its top price, this year.
Speaker 2: Has he got a chance? No, it's gone, isn't it?
Speaker 3: Well? Probably, I mean it exists in the world. If
Speaker 3: it's in a landfill, it exists in the world. If
Speaker 3: he could convince somebody to go back and if the
Speaker 3: records were kept well enough to go back and have
Speaker 3: a pretty good guess of exactly where it was buried,
Speaker 3: and he was willing to probably pay a hefty amount
Speaker 3: of money to get them to excavate. Here's the other thing, though,
Speaker 3: how far down is it and what infrastructure has been
Speaker 3: put in place on top of it, Because if it's
Speaker 3: a landfill built today, there are leechate and methane and
Speaker 3: other volatile organic compound retrieval and treatment methods, so it's
Speaker 3: not just a hump of earth with garbage inside. It's
Speaker 3: a very complex, very carefully engineered geography. And if his
Speaker 3: bitcoin thing is down many layers and they would have
Speaker 3: to disrupt the system that then is part of the
Speaker 3: entire complex. I don't know that there's enough money in
Speaker 3: the world to convince anybody to do.
Speaker 2: That, right. The sad thing is I think it was
Speaker 2: like half a billion dollars on a dis drive a bitcoin.
Speaker 2: But the sad thing is it is just Bitcoin's tanked
Speaker 2: in the last six months, so it's like every day
Speaker 2: that he's not getting it. Is just I just I
Speaker 2: want him to do that eternal sunshine and just be
Speaker 2: able to take that part of his brain that knows
Speaker 2: he threw away Bitcoin and just take it out of
Speaker 2: his brain and just let him lay of you know
Speaker 2: what I mean. But that brings up a good question though.
Speaker 2: Bradley Ladwig, first time question asker, longtime listener, says that
Speaker 2: I've heard that new landfills are using enzymes to speed
Speaker 2: up decomposition and using methane capture to generate electricity. Are
Speaker 2: those methods being widely utilized yet.
Speaker 3: In a contemporary landfill.
Speaker 2: Yes, oh, okay, that's great. Yeah, the methane capture does
Speaker 2: that go right back into the natural gas pipeline.
Speaker 3: So I don't know the physics or the chemistry of this,
Speaker 3: but it's part of gases that are at least in
Speaker 3: this part of the world sold back to the national
Speaker 3: grid and then are used to help heat homes in
Speaker 3: the area.
Speaker 2: Okay, just a side note on this, So natural gas
Speaker 2: and landfill gas or LFG aren't the same thing, just
Speaker 2: because when microbes are chomping and burping and doing their thing.
Speaker 2: They're also making CO two so LFG or landfill gas
Speaker 2: straight out of the pipe. Raw might be fifty to
Speaker 2: fifty methane and CO two with some other volatile compounds
Speaker 2: mixed in, give or take. So vertical and horizontal pipes
Speaker 2: are buried in the landfill and they collect the gas
Speaker 2: and then it gets cooled and processed before being sold
Speaker 2: for other purposes as natural gas. But landfills are farting,
Speaker 2: and we capture it, we cherish it, and then we
Speaker 2: burn it for money. Speaking of gross, Shelby reared and
Speaker 2: asked how dirty is trash? And Evily Sanchez requested info
Speaker 2: on the worst thing Robin has ever found in the garbage.
Speaker 2: She wasn't the only one. Amy Nermatsu wants to know,
Speaker 2: what's the nastiest thing you've ever seen.
Speaker 3: I find a large conglomeration of maggots at the bottom,
Speaker 3: let's say, of a plastic or metal garbage can to
Speaker 3: be really really like it absolutely wigs me out, and
Speaker 3: that's not fair to the maggots, and it's like they're
Speaker 3: just they're just little beings in the world. Then we
Speaker 3: create the conditions for them to exist, and in fact,
Speaker 3: if you have it's really gross. But if you have
Speaker 3: a wound, like a deep flesh wound and it's not healing,
Speaker 3: but you drop a maggot in there, that MAGGI will
Speaker 3: eat all the dead infected flesh and you will have
Speaker 3: a very very healthy wound that then will heal. So
Speaker 3: maggots actually could have a role in healthcare and have
Speaker 3: had in the past. But yeah, so I I maggots
Speaker 3: for you.
Speaker 2: They're just babies.
Speaker 3: They're just little beings trying to exist in the world.
Speaker 3: I very I feel that, very strong, like.
Speaker 2: You're just my infants. They're just flying.
Speaker 3: Even if they were grown up flies, I'm less wigged
Speaker 3: up by them. But don't they have a right to live?
Speaker 3: And how we made the conditions that make them prosper?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: We did? We throw the party? Were like perfect for you.
Speaker 3: Maggots come on over. Same with rats New York City
Speaker 3: among other cities. But because we use plastic garbage bags,
Speaker 3: m we have created what a colleague of mine calls
Speaker 3: rat topia. Okay, why how because we have food waste
Speaker 3: in those bags all over the city, especially at night
Speaker 3: because rats tend to be nocturnal. And then so we
Speaker 3: put the from restaurants especially, but food waste from houses
Speaker 3: as well. We put them out the bags bags. I
Speaker 3: don't care how minty the flavoring of the bag is.
Speaker 3: It just means the rat will have breath that smelled
Speaker 3: like you just brushed his teeth. It will not dissuade
Speaker 3: them from eating into and getting food from those bags.
Speaker 3: So as long as we are reliant on plastic bags
Speaker 3: at the curb at night, we are feeding rats.
Speaker 2: Oh well, two things about that. Number One, there's an
Speaker 2: episode I did with doctor Bobby Core again.
Speaker 3: He's my man.
Speaker 2: I love him.
Speaker 3: Bobby is the best. He's the one who has the
Speaker 3: term rat topia. I didn't know you did one with Bobby.
Speaker 2: Missed that, Oh Fantastic's Urban Rodentology. Yeah yeah, Oh, I.
Speaker 3: Lobby's the best. I love him, Bobby. Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, Bobby's the best, absolute best in the world at
Speaker 2: what he does. And there are a ton of people
Speaker 2: Grace Rubis show Seed to the K, Alison baberl, Ali Brown,
Speaker 2: Super Sarah, Nico Peruzzi and Diana m All had questions
Speaker 2: about trash bags, and Grace wants to know are there
Speaker 2: biodegradable garbage bags? Sea to the K wants to know.
Speaker 2: Are you team scented bags? Sea to the K says,
Speaker 2: I am not into tropical garbage. Are there better ways
Speaker 2: to collect our trash?
Speaker 3: Collect or leave on the curb? I guess either.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's get into it.
Speaker 3: Those are two really big questions. Okay, So in terms
Speaker 3: of better ways to collect it, certainly, if we are
Speaker 3: reliant on individual trucks, which at maximum capacity in New
Speaker 3: York the standard truck is specked for about twelve point
Speaker 3: five tons, you in certain conditions you can squeeze as
Speaker 3: much as fourteen fifteen tons on that truck. But if
Speaker 3: you think about that, we generate about ten thousand tons
Speaker 3: a day. So, but then then how do we like
Speaker 3: You don't want eight point eight million people driving somewhere
Speaker 3: with their garbage to drop off their little household waste.
Speaker 3: You know that the infrastructure and air quality stressed from
Speaker 3: that would be absurd. There are a couple of pilot
Speaker 3: programs right now that are containerizing garbage in the middle
Speaker 3: of a block, like they do in many cities in Europe,
Speaker 3: where I, a householder, can carry my bag, put it
Speaker 3: in the right container, it locks behind me, rats can't
Speaker 3: get it, and then the truck comes. I don't know
Speaker 3: at what intervals to get that material. You're still dealing
Speaker 3: with the truck. We have designed the system sort of
Speaker 3: by default, but because we designed it, we can redesign it,
Speaker 3: like we could decide to do it differently in terms
Speaker 3: of better ways to leave it for collection, if we
Speaker 3: want to use that collection system still and instead of
Speaker 3: leaving it on the curb. First of all, plastic bags
Speaker 3: are a disaster.
Speaker 2: I thought so.
Speaker 3: If we did compost more rigorously, if we separated our
Speaker 3: food waste and put them into what New York used
Speaker 3: as what they call the brown bin system. Those brown
Speaker 3: bins are almost completely impermeable to pests. I think a rat, really,
Speaker 3: really really stubborn rat that came back to the same
Speaker 3: one for night after night after night might be able
Speaker 3: to get through. But they were designed to be super sturdy.
Speaker 3: So if you take your people say oh, I don't
Speaker 3: want to compost because I'll get rats because of my
Speaker 3: food waste all in one place. No, you're putting your
Speaker 3: food waste in a far more secure container and leaving
Speaker 3: the rest of your garbage that the rats don't want.
Speaker 3: You will have fewer pests if you compost the public has.
Speaker 3: You have to understand that on a broad scale. Plastic
Speaker 3: bags were introduced for good reasons between nineteen sixty nine
Speaker 3: and nineteen seventy one in New York, and they do.
Speaker 3: They're easier in many ways for the householder. I want
Speaker 3: to say they cause fewer injuries for the worker, but
Speaker 3: that's not necessarily true. It's a different type of injury
Speaker 3: than what metal cans created. But the convenience of it.
Speaker 3: You don't have to store the bags when they're empty.
Speaker 3: There's all kinds of ways that they're convenient, but they
Speaker 3: create a host of problems, like rats.
Speaker 2: What did people use before plastic.
Speaker 3: Bags, metal garbage cans? That was it?
Speaker 2: Like, I'll just awster the grouse straight up? Yeah right, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, I guess I remember my dad dragging that
Speaker 2: to the curb and those were everywhere in New York
Speaker 2: before then.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And if the lid was off a little bit
Speaker 3: and it rained filled with rain water. And this was
Speaker 3: also when a lot of buildings heated with coal, so
Speaker 3: you often had ash in these been in the in
Speaker 3: the cans. The cans get rusted, the cans get dented,
Speaker 3: the cans create like that. Those rusty edges, then cut
Speaker 3: workers and then they get gangreen from the tetanus. No
Speaker 3: lockjaw and tetanus. Yeah, so the cans were not great either.
Speaker 3: They're also heavy as hell, you know, as the plastic
Speaker 3: cans we call them plastic containers can be receptacles, and
Speaker 3: then you have the weight issue of how do you
Speaker 3: lift it? The cans were not great, but bags are
Speaker 3: not great either.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, but patrons kJ first time question asker Stephanie
Speaker 2: trout Berman, Christina Kassakis, Connie E Karringer, Nicole Kleinman, Samuel Harvey, Barb,
Speaker 2: chang Ira Gray, and Marin Prophet wanted to know about
Speaker 2: hazardous items and the dangers lurking on curbs. How often
Speaker 2: do those cuts or sticks with sharp things.
Speaker 3: Like so needles. I don't know how often needlesticks happen,
Speaker 3: but they happen. Sanitation and refuse work, according to the
Speaker 3: Bureau of Labor Statistics, is far, far, far more dangerous
Speaker 3: than being a cop or a firefighter, and it's always
Speaker 3: in the top ten most Dangerous jobs list, which comes
Speaker 3: out every two years. That category sanitation refuse work is
Speaker 3: always somewhere in the top ten. It moves maybe from
Speaker 3: four to seven or from seven to five, but it's
Speaker 3: always there. The three sources of harm are the trash itself,
Speaker 3: because especially with plastic bags, it punctures the bags, it
Speaker 3: punctures the workers, the truck, the mechanics of the truck.
Speaker 3: When you put a bag in the back of the truck,
Speaker 3: there's a it's called the blade. The hopper comes down
Speaker 3: and scoops it up to compress it into the body
Speaker 3: of the truck. But that exerts immense pressure, and often
Speaker 3: what is caught by the blade of the hopper catapults
Speaker 3: back out at you. So you never want to be
Speaker 3: behind a truck when the hopper is cycling, So that's
Speaker 3: another source of harm the truck. Also, mechanics of the
Speaker 3: truck fail sometimes and hurt people, and then traffic motorists
Speaker 3: are impatient to get around a truck, understandably but often
Speaker 3: without remembering there are human beings who are working with
Speaker 3: that vehicle and they're somewhere nearby, and if you go
Speaker 3: around them, take care that you're not gonna hurt them,
Speaker 3: hit them, kill them. So those are the sources of
Speaker 3: the harm, and it's ubiquitous. You will not get through
Speaker 3: a twenty two year career without injury.
Speaker 2: You just won't.
Speaker 3: Even if it's something seemingly mundane like your discs erupt
Speaker 3: or your rotator cuffs and your shoult like and I
Speaker 3: say seemingly mundane, those are crippling. Yeah, So even if
Speaker 3: it's that you wear the work on your body for
Speaker 3: the rest of your life.
Speaker 2: And I'm going to guess that san Asian workers don't
Speaker 2: get free Starbucks like cops and firefighters.
Speaker 3: There's all kinds of Like there's sporting good stores that
Speaker 3: if you're a copper firefighter you automatically get ten percent off.
Speaker 3: There are yes, free donuts, the famous donuts for coffee.
Speaker 3: You don't get that as a sanitation It's yeah, it's
Speaker 3: definitely the step child agency of those three.
Speaker 2: Is there something that you feel like sanitation workers should
Speaker 2: get at the holidays? Like should you be baking cookies
Speaker 2: and leaving them stufwhere this is not carbag this is
Speaker 2: for you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, go to your local garage with holiday cookies, have
Speaker 3: enough for everybody and understand there's more than one shift,
Speaker 3: but yeah, or talk to the garage superintendent and find
Speaker 3: out what deli the guys like most and order a
Speaker 3: big old one of those you know, six foot long sandwiches.
Speaker 3: They you can't give them beer because of rule changes,
Speaker 3: but you know, sodas and anything, especially if you do
Speaker 3: it through the garage. If a sanitation worker is on
Speaker 3: the route and you offer him even a cup of coffee,
Speaker 3: technically it's illegal, and technically they could get in really
Speaker 3: big trouble for it, even if it's something humble like that.
Speaker 3: So if they don't know you and you offer them
Speaker 3: a cup of coffee, they're probably going to say no.
Speaker 3: But if you go through the garage and you're like
Speaker 3: my second grade class wants to adopt your garage or
Speaker 3: my community organization or my family, we just want to
Speaker 3: acknowledge you somehow. Yeah heck, yeah, h.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's so good to know. So cookies sandwiches do
Speaker 2: it now? Some patrons Isabelle sleigh Maker, Margot Rosenbaum, Kylie
Speaker 2: m Smith, Eric Johnson, and Susie Kroger wanted to know's
Speaker 2: house smelly? A lot of people? Final question from listeners
Speaker 2: want to know like Deli Dames wants to know do
Speaker 2: people who work directly with garbage sanitation does it change
Speaker 2: their sense of smell? I know that you said that
Speaker 2: when you were working with it, you stop noticing it.
Speaker 2: But is there anything that sanitation workers do for themselves
Speaker 2: to kind of end the day and get back to
Speaker 2: home or anything that the municipalities are doing about smell,
Speaker 2: Because it's something that it's a stigma.
Speaker 3: I have never asked them if it has changed their
Speaker 3: sense of smell. It's a lovely question, and I don't
Speaker 3: know the answer. I will say many sanitation workers would
Speaker 3: never ever wear their uniform home. They will shower and
Speaker 3: change back into the street clothes. And some garages actually
Speaker 3: pitched in to buy washer dryer for the garage, so
Speaker 3: they never take their uniform home. They wash it on site,
Speaker 3: so they're never bringing it into the family laundry system.
Speaker 3: I know some workers that's their choice. I know others
Speaker 3: who are completely nonchalant about like, yeah, whatever, I washed
Speaker 3: this last week, what's the big deal? You know?
Speaker 2: I mean, I guess you know a lot of people
Speaker 2: wear shoes all over the city and then wear the
Speaker 2: shoes inside their house without taking them off.
Speaker 3: So you know, who knows that has come to wig
Speaker 3: me out as much as somebody picking their nose and
Speaker 3: eating the boogers. Like just when I see shoes inside,
Speaker 3: I just I'm like, no, you don't have.
Speaker 2: To do that and take it for someone who literally
Speaker 2: is the sanitation at their politics, Like that grosses you out.
Speaker 2: You know, take the shoes off at the door, apparently.
Speaker 3: Also, if you want to cut your risk of getting
Speaker 3: sick from anything, COVID, the flu, anything, there are two
Speaker 3: things you should do as soon as you walk in
Speaker 3: the door of your home. One is wash your hands.
Speaker 3: The other is take off your shoes. Those two things together, apparently,
Speaker 3: are absolutely excellent protections. This is not a fail safe,
Speaker 3: but you are far less likely to get sick if
Speaker 3: you do those two things.
Speaker 2: I remember hearing that hemlines got shorter because of tuberculosis
Speaker 2: because people were just dragging long skirts through lookies and
Speaker 2: bringing them back into their house, and so like, I
Speaker 2: just think about that when I think about taking my
Speaker 2: shoes off.
Speaker 3: Just that is a cool fact.
Speaker 2: Way, Now, there's got to be something that sucks about
Speaker 2: studying garbage other than the term garbageology. Is what's the
Speaker 2: thing that is the hardest about the job or just
Speaker 2: the toughest thing about the field in general.
Speaker 3: This is a consistent source of dismay for me when
Speaker 3: acknowledging essential workers city uniform forces. People whose work is
Speaker 3: fundamental to our daily well being, the people who collect
Speaker 3: our garbage and who sweep our streets, are almost never
Speaker 3: mentioned and it breaks my heart. And I include here
Speaker 3: not just municipal workers, but people working for the private
Speaker 3: companies as well, whose jobs are often far more difficult
Speaker 3: than what the municipal workers have to face, and yet
Speaker 3: we don't acknowledge them. So even just saying thank you
Speaker 3: when you see somebody working the truck, it's a small gesture.
Speaker 3: But what if everybody did it. What if that was understood, like, oh,
Speaker 3: there's a sanitation guy, I want to say, I thank you.
Speaker 3: What if that was just expected and normal and common,
Speaker 3: that would be fantastic because that would then also trickle up,
Speaker 3: as it were, to helping when there are more formal acknowledgments,
Speaker 3: making sure that those folks get the recognition they deserve.
Speaker 3: That one recent example, September eleventh, just passed the twenty
Speaker 3: first anniversary. Sanitation was absolutely pivotal in the city's response,
Speaker 3: but rarely gets mentioned when there are formal acknowledgments. No
Speaker 3: one on the job died on the job because of
Speaker 3: that tragedy, but since that tragedy, one hundred and twelve
Speaker 3: people have died of very weird cancers, almost all of
Speaker 3: which are directly attributable to the exposures they got through
Speaker 3: working ground zero. There's a young woman who works for
Speaker 3: sanitation who's doing she's a background in film who's doing
Speaker 3: a documentary to try and get that story more attention.
Speaker 3: But it's still generally not well known at all. And
Speaker 3: so what my source of dismay. And I realize I'm
Speaker 3: kind of going on and on about this, but they
Speaker 3: deserve more public awareness and praise and thanks and attitude.
Speaker 3: They need to be front and center in our attention.
Speaker 2: And I'm also going to guess the moniker of garbage man,
Speaker 2: which is not it's what you use anymore?
Speaker 3: Sanitation worker.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I imagine that must be a label that
Speaker 2: they hear a lot.
Speaker 3: There was a headline in the Statina and Advance about
Speaker 3: something about a garbage man, and I wrote to them
Speaker 3: immediately and I didn't say I didn't say it in
Speaker 3: language as strong as I felt. You know, you want
Speaker 3: to be polite, but they change the headline.
Speaker 2: Good.
Speaker 3: It's one small thing.
Speaker 2: And I love that you're an advocate for that and
Speaker 2: that you've been in the actual job and in the
Speaker 2: uniform and in the truck.
Speaker 3: I'm very proud of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah you should be. What is your favorite thing about
Speaker 2: what you do in general? About studying this, about being
Speaker 2: an anthropologist, about working in sanitation, about the friends you've made, anything.
Speaker 3: Sometimes I look around at the university where I work,
Speaker 3: and I wonder if my job in NYU matters. Yes,
Speaker 3: I teach, and maybe I have influenced on my students,
Speaker 3: and yeah I write some, although not as much as
Speaker 3: I should, and like that's good. But when I'm working
Speaker 3: with sanitation people, their work absolutely matters to the well
Speaker 3: being of this city every single day, profoundly so it's
Speaker 3: so important. It's like the oxygen in the air. We
Speaker 3: get to completely overlook it and take it for granted
Speaker 3: and just assume it's going to be there. But if
Speaker 3: it weren't, we would be in deep shit. That connecting
Speaker 3: to people whose jobs are so profoundly essential in the
Speaker 3: deepest possible way, that is deeply satisfying. Also that they've
Speaker 3: let me in, you know, because who the hell am I? Right?
Speaker 3: But over time they have let me in, and that's
Speaker 3: an honor. I also really enjoy watching their friendships. They
Speaker 3: form bonds of camaraderie that often last far longer than
Speaker 3: the job itself, and that I don't see. I don't
Speaker 3: see counterparts of that within NYU. And maybe that's because
Speaker 3: I'm sort of an introvert in this world, and maybe
Speaker 3: that's on me, But I really enjoy watching the bonds
Speaker 3: that they form in the trenches on the War on Grime.
Speaker 3: I still have trouble telling that story without choking up.
Speaker 3: In fact, in that moment in the Ted Talk, I
Speaker 3: had a moment of like I can't just I can't
Speaker 3: cry it tenn talk. So thank your sanitation workers. Yeah,
Speaker 3: thank you so much for doing this, Thanks for your
Speaker 3: interest this is and thank all your readers for their
Speaker 3: great questions.
Speaker 2: Oh, such good questions. I literally could talk about garbage forever.
Speaker 3: Indeed does one could.
Speaker 2: So ask smart people garbage questions because we're here to
Speaker 2: find out, and look, they love answering them. Go watch
Speaker 2: Robin's Ted Talk, Go google composting if you feel inspired,
Speaker 2: clean out a closet, get a reusable water bottle if
Speaker 2: you don't have one, and vote and for more on
Speaker 2: doctor Robin Nakeel. You can see the links in the
Speaker 2: show notes and enjoy her book picking up on the
Speaker 2: streets and behind the trucks with the sanitation workers of
Speaker 2: New York City, which will also link the show notes.
Speaker 2: There will be links to so much that we discussed
Speaker 2: on my website twenty twenty five for me again. Okay,
Speaker 2: So we are at Ologies now on Blue Sky and
Speaker 2: on Instagram, and I'm Ali Ward with one L on both.
Speaker 2: We also now have a spinoff show called Smologies, which
Speaker 2: are episodes in their own feed wherever you get podcasts
Speaker 2: again called Smologies their shorter kid friendly episodes grated. There's
Speaker 2: a link in the show notes. Tell all your friends.
Speaker 2: Ologies Merch is available at ologiesmerch dot com. Aaron Talbert
Speaker 2: admin's our Ologies podcast facebook group. Emily White made the
Speaker 2: transcripts but passed the torch to Aveline Mallick. Kelly R.
Speaker 2: Dwyer does the website. Susan Hale is our amazing managing director.
Speaker 2: Noel Dilworth is scheduling producer and like a second brain
Speaker 2: for me. Jake Chafee has since joined our edit team,
Speaker 2: and huge exciting credit for this one goes to our
Speaker 2: lead editor, the very not trash but in fact treasure,
Speaker 2: Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, who was once simply a
Speaker 2: listener and then reached out multiple times, became an intern
Speaker 2: and then an assistant editor, and has now been for
Speaker 2: many years at the helm of piecing the show together
Speaker 2: every week, so many ups to her. This was actually
Speaker 2: a very first episode that she lead edited, so it's
Speaker 2: a favorite for that reason too. And Nick Thorburn did
Speaker 2: the theme music. And if you stick around to the
Speaker 2: very end of the episode, I tell you a secret.
Speaker 2: And this one is updated for twenty twenty five. It
Speaker 2: is April eighth, twenty twenty five, and it's that while
Speaker 2: I'm recording this to go up tonight, there have been
Speaker 2: helicopters over our neighborhood for like an hour or two,
Speaker 2: and according to the news, on their freeway right near
Speaker 2: our house, there was a three car accident that turned
Speaker 2: into a hit and run with a few people on
Speaker 2: the lamb running from the cops, and one of them
Speaker 2: was a woman who exchanged gunfire with the police before
Speaker 2: hiding in the park that we go take the dog to.
Speaker 2: And then there was a second person fleeing the crash,
Speaker 2: I guess, and to quote the local news station, the
Speaker 2: shirtless suspect was seen running out of the car and
Speaker 2: into a bad while carrying a guitar. And then that
Speaker 2: person was hanging around someone's pool, watering the plants and
Speaker 2: talking on the phone. But then the last reports I've
Speaker 2: heard is that the person who's still at large shooting
Speaker 2: at the CHP officers may be totally unrelated to the
Speaker 2: crash itself and just another person having kind of a
Speaker 2: wild day happens stance on the same block anyway, having
Speaker 2: a very la day here a little hard to record
Speaker 2: with helicopters overhead, But I'm just I'm hoping it works
Speaker 2: out well for everyone and no one gets hurt, and
Speaker 2: maybe in a few years someone gets a book deal
Speaker 2: out of it. I don't know, just another Tuesday, Okay,
Speaker 2: bye bye, pacadermatology, hobbiology or doo zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology,
Speaker 2: old pathology, anthology, seriology, elinology.
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